Farming Slows Global Warming

Contrary to popular belief, high crop yields created by industrialized farming have greatly slowed global warming by preventing deforestation for new farmland, says a new study from the Carnegie Institution.

15 June, 2010

Contrary to popular belief, high crop yields created by industrialized farming have greatly slowed global warming by preventing deforestation for new farmland, says a new study from the Carnegie Institution. "Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues calculated how much greenhouse gases would have been emitted over the past half-century if the green revolution had not happened," writes the New Scientist. "It found that, overall, the intensification of farming helped keep the equivalent of 600 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere – roughly a third of all human greenhouse-gas emissions between 1850 and 2005."